Chapter Text
Jason had almost forgotten how good this felt: the familiar pull of his grappling line and the accompanying push of cold city air whilst soaring above Gotham’s streets. His body buzzed as he landed on a mid-rise roof with a smooth roll, reveling in the feel of asphalt under his boots.
Black Bat landed noiselessly beside him, the cape draped around her neck like a massive scarf billowing black and yellow in the winter breeze. Together they stood at the ledge and looked down into the dark back street below.
Most of upper Gotham hadn’t been renovated in generations, with some areas retaining the ancient cobbling and crumbling infrastructure of years past. The Stacked Deck was located on one such road: as one of the most historical buildings in Gotham’s scummy history, the notorious casino and pool hall was frequented by all tiers of criminality.
“I came here sometimes as a kid,” Jason said conversationally. “Lot of courier work to be found here. It’s also where I was gonna find someone to buy Batman’s tires, actually.”
They would’ve definitely ripped him off anyway.
“Hmm.”
“So just be mindful of any children that might be slinking around. Also, the bartender’s definitely gonna be packing something automatic.”
Black Bat nodded absently as she rubbed a nonexistent speck off one of Jason’s crimson vambraces.
“You look good.”
He felt good. As much as he’d liked his Red Hood getup, the jacket and trousers had really been better suited for his crime lord persona. Vigilante-ing had a different set of requirements.
The new armor was a dream of black and red and tungsten, and Jason really needed to remember to shout out to Barbara for helping to bring Cass’ doodles to life. Even the bat ears were kinda starting to grow on him.
“Thanks.”
“I was not paying compliment. I was taking credit.” She gave a playful tap to the reinforced glass of his helmet, right where his nose would be. “This is going to be fun.”
Jason went through the front, kicking the doors open and firing a taser dart into the bartender before all the heads in the room had even finished turning his way.
A second later Black Bat was swooping through the back door with a swift flourish, cape flaring behind her as she deployed a smoke grenade. There was shouting and the sounds of loading weapons as thick yellow smog swamped the gambling hall.
The HUD of Jason’s helmet sprang to life, highlighting the heat signatures of three dozen men around him. No children in sight. Good.
With a kick he flipped the nearest poker table on its side, the scarlet greaves attached to his boots making it the easiest thing to punt it into a group of men hard enough to knock them over like bowling pins. On the other side of the room he could hear the whip of Black Bat’s cape along with the harsh thuds of combat.
Jason caught a blind swing of a pool cue and cracked it into the bridge of his attacker’s nose. He then wrenched a billiards table upright in front of him, a split second later feeling it splinter and break with the raining force of small caliber bullets. When the firing ceased he backhanded the table aside, raining its pieces into a gaggle of stumbling thugs. A batarang was unhitched from his belt and struck the weapon from its shooter’s hand with a clatter.
The smoke was starting to thin and another grunt was coming at him with a semi-automatic handgun. Jason responded by ducking and rolling under the fire before slamming him into a wall so hard he could see the guy’s world spin.
At that moment another man must have lost his nerve because he was suddenly running for the exit. Jason didn’t even think about it when he picked the dropped gun off the ground and fired a single shot into the would-be escapee’s leg.
The room went quiet and still at the sound of his scream.
“Holy shit,” one of the men said hoarsely. “A bat just fucking used a gun.”
“Little brother,” Black Bat said scoldingly.
“Reflex,” Jason said by way of apology, removing the magazine and tossing it onto the nearest upright table. “Alright gents. I’m sure you’re all aware of why we had to crash your little party.”
“Dunno what you’re talking about!” One man spat, kneeling on the floor and clutching what must have been a broken wrist. “We weren’t doin' nothing!”
“Oh no?” Jason asked in the smooth modulation of his helmet’s filter. “Because last I checked you and your friends were members of the Galante Family. And you were planning a move on the Wayne kids.”
There was a wary exchanging of glances amongst the conscious thugs.
“Now I know you must be a little sore about the car they drove into your restaurant, but come on. Kids, am I right? I’m sure they’re very sorry -“
“I would not be,” Black Bat said.
“So why don’t we let bygones be bygones-” Jason stabbed a 6-inch tactical knife into the polished surface of the bar, mere millimeters away from the hand of a man who’d been reaching for a pistol. “- before someone gets hurt.”
The man swallowed. “Just who the hell are you supposed to be, anyway?”
Jason opened his mouth to respond, but Black Bat beat him to it.
“Red Bat.”
“Red B- wait, what?” Jason lowered his voice and tried to subtly turn to her. “You said we’d think about this.”
“I have thought. And I have decided.” Black Bat folded her arms. “Red Bat.”
“But I -“
“You promised.”
Jason’s sigh was magnified by his modulator.
“Fine.” He turned back to the man. “We’ve already got someone spreading the word to your Russian friends, so here’s our message to you: no one hassles the Wayne kids, and that includes Brown. Anyone bothers her or her mom and they answer to us. Got it?”
He ripped his knife out of the bar.
“Good.”
As they trudged over the wood and glass debris to the exit, Jason could just make out over his shoulder,
“I fucking told you Wayne was getting yiffed by Batman.”
“You used a gun.”
Jason groaned so loud it nearly echoed in the vast chambers of the Batcave.
The echo didn’t seem to go as far as usual though. The cave had become fuller lately, with all of the trophies from Jason’s days as Robin being brought out of storage for the first time in six years. No one said anything about it, nor did they mention his Robin suit being moved and displayed with the other old costume cases with its plaque pointedly missing.
“You told us to clean up our mess and we did. I agreed to no killing in Gotham. Not to no guns.”
Jason gave Cass a pointed look and she stuck her tongue out in return. The lack of firearm holsters for his suit hadn’t been subtle.
“Besides.” He turned back to Bruce, who was giving him the classic cold stare of judgement across from a forensics table. “It’s not like I planned to or anything. A guy was rabbiting and I stopped him.”
“A batarang would have done just as well.”
“But the gun was what made them ceasefire long enough for me to get a word in.”
“I don’t suppose you planned for that either.”
“Does it matter?”
Bruce frowned. Even without the cowl down, there was something about being in full Batman regalia that made him seem so much taller than the mere inches between them in height.
He probably wears lifts in those boots, Jason thought bitterly.
“Jason. This… ability of yours is starting to become a concern.”
“What the hell are you talking about.” It was a split second before he remembered the mics and cameras that had probably adorned every square inch of the manor the night of the Winter Gala. “You son of a bitch.”
“If what Talia said is true -”
“If what she said is true then I’ve had this my whole life,” Jason said. “And I’ve been fine.”
For a moment it felt like even the bats were giving him skeptical looks.
“I’m fine!” Jason insisted louder.
“As fine as you were when you purposefully injured yourself?” Bruce asked, his eyes hard.
Jason turned on Cass and gestured at the space between them. “You and I are going to have a serious talk about sibling confidentiality.”
“There will be terms.”
“Jason. Whatever ability you possess is clearly of a different nature than Cassandra’s. If it poses a risk to you or others, we can’t ignore it as you continue to enter high-risk situations.”
“I know what this is about,” Jason said, helmet clutched tightly between his hands. “You want to think that this meta-whatever is to blame for all the times I’ve killed, just like you wanted to think the pit madness was to blame. But it’s not. I’ve always been the one making my own choices and whatever this is, it doesn’t change that.”
“I’ve already called someone,” Bruce said, his face stoic. “They’ll be arriving in Gotham this week to help you.”
“You-” Jason laughed in disbelief. “Of fucking course you did. Well it’s a waste of all our time because I told you, I can manage this myself. What the hell are they going to know about it that I don’t?”
“I’ve brought in an expert on the subject.”
Jason scoffed, turning away. “An expert, sure. Whatever.”
He made it all of five paces away before stopping short.
Wait.
“Bruce,” he said, calmly but with a warning tremor. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“Jason-”
“No, no. I know you didn’t. I know you didn’t do the thing I told everyone from the very fucking beginning not to do!”
Jason didn’t feel the helmet drop from his hands but he heard the clatter of it upon the stone cave floor.
“It’s for you, Jason.” And Bruce’s eyes were so goddamn earnest it made his insides coil. “It’s for your safety.”
“My safe…” Jason’s words faded as he raked his hands over his face. “Oh my god you did it. I can’t fucking believe. I,”
He shook his head.
“How long was it,” he said roughly. “How long after you learned Shiva was my mother did you dig it out.”
A question Jason already knew the answer to.
“As soon as I heard.” Bruce’s voice was as deliberately impassive as ever. “He-”
“I don’t care who he is!” Jason snapped. “I wanted it left alone. I’d say that I can’t believe you’d do this, but. That’d be a lie. This is so exactly like you.”
He scooped his helmet back up and made for his bike.
“Shut the doors on me this time and I’m coming back to run you over, old man.”
The cool night air did Jason’s head some good as he sat with one leg dangling over the building’s side. His back was pressed comfortingly against an old gargoyle as the minutes to dawn counted down.
The call came in on his helmet and he answered, however reluctantly.
“It was you, wasn’t it.”
“Hello to you too. Red Bat, is it?” Oracle’s voice asked. “I bet that made Cass happy.”
“One of us should be.” Jason adjusted his position on the stone ledge. “Out with it then. I don’t suppose you were going to tell me what he was up to?”
“For what it’s worth, I told him he should have gotten you on board first,” Oracle said.
“Fat chance.”
“Hm.” Oracle paused. “... About your biological father. I don’t know what you might have thought, given his relationship with Shiva. But he’s not a bad man, Jason.”
“And you would know.”
“I would, actually. Do you want me to tell you?”
Jason sighed, tilting his head back to gaze into the overcast skies above. Maybe there would be snow soon.
“I don’t have a choice anymore, do I. Not unless I want to be caught completely unprepared.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the low howl of high-altitude winds as they blew through the tallest of the city towers and high-rise buildings.
“His name is Richard Dragon. And he just might be the greatest martial artist in the world.”
Jason made a point of avoiding Bruce after that. He’d gotten better at giving the silent treatment in the past few years and was certain he could keep it up just as long as Bruce could keep up his stony ‘ignoring you ignoring me’ facade. It wasn’t worth holding out for an apology or a cancellation of the plans Bruce had made behind Jason’s back, but still.
He was sick and tired of being treated like his choices hadn’t counted, like they still didn’t count. Like he constantly needed to be helped or fixed or cured of something because Bruce didn’t like what he was doing. He should’ve known better than to think the old man could leave well enough alone.
Jason lay in his room and stared up at the ceiling, cogs turning in his head. Bruce hadn’t even waited before prying; hadn’t even known yet about this apparent legacy Jason was carrying around in his genes.
In his hands Jason held the old photograph he and Cass had received from the dojo in Kyoto: three young students and their aging sensei.
Bronze Tiger, Dragon, Paper Monkey.
Benjamin Turner, Richard Drakunovski, Sandra Wu-san.
Jason hadn’t originally spared much thought for the second boy in the picture, mostly because he hadn’t wanted to know. He still didn’t want to know.
Richard Dragon. A man who’d trained Bruce, Dick, Huntress, the first Question and even Barbara after she’d been disabled. Who was apparently so good at what he did that Lady Shiva had carried his child by choice. But if this guy was so great, why didn’t she leave Jason with him?
He sighed and slung an arm across his face. This was why he wanted to leave this whole mess behind him. All of these questions were meant to be laid to rest and buried in that hotel room in Toronto.
“Jason?” Cass gave a soft knock on the doorframe before poking her head in. “It’s time.”
“What if I don’t want to go.”
Cass frowned before coming to sit beside him on the bed.
“You are frustrated.”
“Yes.”
“And scared.”
“N- what would I be scared of.”
Her brow furrowed.
“Of what you might learn. That it will change how you see yourself.” She paused. “And that Bruce will never trust you.”
“As if he’s ever going to anyway.” Jason muttered. “Not with him actively looking for new reasons not to.”
“That is not how he sees it.”
“It never is.” He looked her in the eyes. “Do you think I need this?”
Cass worried her bottom lip.
“You let me hurt you, in Detroit. On purpose.”
“Yeah, but…”
“And I did not predict it. You moved and I did not see,” Cass said. “And I think… that if something were to happen, that I would not be able to stop you. It scares me.”
Jason pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily.
“I’m not making any promises. I still think this is a huge waste of everyone’s time.”
Cass hugged him tightly and Jason accepted it, cursing every weak part of himself.
The drive to Old Gotham was silent.
Jason kept his arms folded across his hammering chest, trying and failing to not look like he wanted to get swallowed up by the car seat.
Dick had been camping out in the penthouse for months, but ever since the gala he’d unceremoniously begun living out of his old room. In the last week he’d volunteered to finally clean out the last of his stuff and offer the penthouse to their ‘guest’, but Jason suspected he was just being opportunistic about it. The entire debacle had made it easy for Dick to transition back under Bruce’s roof with minimal awkwardness, and Jason had to remember to call him on that debt someday.
The stony silence between Bruce and Jason continued for the whole journey, not breaking until they were in the elevator and halfway to the uppermost floor.
“Jason -”
“Don’t. I’m not interested in your reasons,” Jason said shortly, compulsively picking at the seams inside his pockets. “And don’t even try the whole ‘for your safety’ bit, you had your fingers prying into my business before you even had a reason.”
“I don’t need one to worry about your wellbeing,” Bruce said, similarly terse.
“Oh, so you don’t even think you need to justify invading my shit, is that right?”
“That’s not what I -”
Ding.
Bruce took a steadying breath and led them to the double doors of the penthouse entrance.
“What’s he like?” Jason couldn’t help but blurt. “You knew him, right?”
“It was a long time ago.” Bruce paused. “He was… a good teacher.”
Which told him absolutely nothing. Jason huffed and forced his hand steady long enough to knock firmly.
A scant few moments later, and the door opened.
Richard Dragon looked Bruce’s age, maybe a few years older.
His hair was red, which was maybe the most surprising thing, but it had the same curl to it that Jason’s did. His eyes were the same shade of blue and even their shape was similar, as was the set of his jaw and curve of his nose. He was paler, taller and with broader shoulders, but. There was a resemblance far stronger than anything Jason could ever have had with Willis Todd.
Several long seconds passed and they only looked at each other.
Then Bruce cleared his throat.
“May we come in?” He asked tightly.
“Of course.” Dragon’s gaze didn’t waver as he stepped aside. “You must be Jason.”
“Um, yeah.” Jason cleared his throat as he narrowly avoided tripping over an entryway table.
“Richard.”
“Right. I mean, I know.” Jason shook his hand, which was rough from rugged mountain living.
Barbara had said that Dragon had more or less disappeared some twenty years back, cloistered up in the Canadian rockies where only a scarce few knew to find him. Jason couldn’t help but suddenly become hyperaware of the calluses on his own palms, the ones that could only be formed by years of frequent gunmanship. He already had Bruce and Shiva judging him over that, and the subtle downward flick of Dragon’s eyes told him there wasn’t much approval to be found here either.
Jason let go and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Look, I’ll be honest. I really think this whole thing’s unnecessary,” he said.
Bruce sighed. “Jason-”
“What makes you say that?”
Jason blinked. Dragon was looking at him with genuine curiosity.
“Well. For starters I don’t like being fussed over and treated like I’m compromised. I feel the same as I ever did!”
“I see. So you’ve never won a fight or escaped a dangerous situation by completely accidentally doing the exact thing you needed to?”
Jason frowned. “Everyone has lucky days.”
“You’ve never acted without knowing why, and later learned that it corresponded with something you couldn’t have possibly known?”
“I have good instincts.”
“And you’ve never blacked out in a fight.”
“I’ve been knocked out before, sure.”
“I mean you’ve never been in a fight, one where you were likely outnumbered and outgunned, lost consciousness and then come to your senses as the last man standing?”
Jason shifted. “There was a very strange chapter of my life around my mid to late adolescence. But nothing like that’s happened since.”
“It didn’t happen to me at all until I was about twenty-five,” Dragon said. “I’m not here to make you do anything you don’t want to, Jason. And I certainly don’t want to make you uncomfortable. But since I’m here, if you’re willing, I don’t see the harm in teaching you some techniques. Just in case.”
Jason was quiet for a long moment as Dragon simply watched him patiently. He seemed sincere enough.
“… I guess.” He turned to Bruce, but to his surprise the man didn’t look pleased or satisfied - instead his eyes were steely and distant. “So I guess I’ll see you at the house, then?”
Bruce’s frown only intensified. “I’ll call you for an update later.”
“Yeah I bet you will.” Jason muttered as he walked him to the door.
For a second Bruce hesitated in the hall, half-turned like he had something to say.
“What?”
Bruce shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
Another moment later and he was across the hall to the elevator and gone.
Jason slowly shut the door, out of sorts for reasons he couldn’t name.
“Okay,” he said. “Where do we start?”
Fifteen minutes later and he was sitting on the floor of the penthouse gym with a tray of tea between him and one of the greatest fighters in the world… who also happened to be his biological father.
“So is this like. Magic tea?”
“If you consider apple blossom and honey magical. Which would be fair,” Dragon said pleasantly.
Jason didn’t know what to make of this guy. Aside from being in good shape there was nothing that implied he was the greatest male martial artist in the world, nor that he had ever been on any kind of positive terms with the likes of Lady Shiva.
Nor that he was for the first time seeing the son he hadn’t known existed for twenty-one years.
It was like Jason was just another student, and Dragon just another teacher. If this was kept up, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so painfully awkward after all.
“I’d like you to try and think back to your most recent incident. Can you describe it to me?” Dragon asked.
“I wouldn’t call it an incident. I was roughing up a gambling hall and stopped a guy who was running. There were a dozen different ways I could’ve done it, but only one that would’ve defused the situation totally. I didn’t even think about it. Just like when I let Cass take out my leg.” Jason sighed. “Everyone’s scared that I’m going to hurt somebody.”
“Or yourself, apparently.”
Jason waved a dismissive hand. “It’d just be easier for them to blame this for anything I’ve ever done wrong. And yeah, I had some… problems with self control a few years ago, for unrelated reasons. I thought this thing was part of that.”
“That’s understandable. My sensei called my ability the Dragon Within. It felt like a force within me had taken over: something stronger and more perceptive than myself that assumed control. It didn’t need thought or deduction - it simply knew what needed to be done and my body followed,” Dragon said. “For a good while I thought I just had a blackout temper.”
“You?”
Dragon seemed like he could’ve greeted the devil himself with a polite smile.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, getting up to pick through the shelves of carefully sorted sparring weapons. “But even I was young once.”
“Sure, but. Isn’t that why you went to the temple in Kyoto?” Jason asked. “To learn control?”
“Uh, no,” Dragon said, tossing a pair of steel escrima to Jason. “I went to the temple to rob it.”
“You what the what?”
“I was fourteen,” he said like that explained everything, picking up one of Dick’s wingdings and turning it over in his hand. “These look fun.”
“What are we doing?” Jason asked, perking up at the notion of real training.
“Nothing too complicated,” Dragon said, looking around. “Any blindfolds around here?”
And that was how Jason wound up blindfolded and armed with two sticks, batting shuriken out of the air.
Bruce had taught them techniques on how to properly handle the batarangs: the ways to hold them so you didn’t slice your hand, how to throw them as noiselessly as possible… but in an enclosed, quiet indoor space like the gym it simply defied physics for the wingdings to come at him that silently.
“Christ,” Jason hissed under his breath as he scarcely deflected another projectile.
“Breathe. You’re too tense.”
“How relaxed am I supposed to be, exactly?”
Shing. Another wingding clattered to the floor.
“You’re thinking too much.”
“I haven’t been stabbed yet, have I?”
Clang.
“That’s only because you’re well-trained,” Dragon said. “Martial arts training makes our ability even more dangerous, but it can also help you to manage it.”
“How?”
“By being aware of yourself you can keep it from activating unintentionally. Steady your breathing. Relax. Anger and fear are the primary triggers that can lead to you doing something you’ll regret.”
Another wingding came at him from almost the opposite direction of Dragon’s voice. Jason felt it cut the air next to him as he narrowly dodged.
“You make it sound like we get possessed,” Jason said.
“It can feel that way, at its worst. When you enter that state you see things, know things that your conscious mind doesn’t register,” Dragon said. “Before your thoughts can catch up you’re already acting. You don’t know why you’re doing what you do, but it’s always what has to be done.”
“Done to what?”
“To win. To survive. To protect what you love most.”
Clang, clang. Two wingdings this time, from utterly different directions. Was this guy telekinetic too? Straining to track Dragon’s footsteps and voice was useless.
“But I wouldn’t hurt an innocent person.” Jason insisted.
“You seem like someone who knows that innocence and guilt don’t exist in a binary,” Dragon said. “Mistakes can always be made.”
Jason took a deep steadying breath and adjusted his grip. He felt his pulse calm.
He still didn’t feel the next projectile coming until it was right on him, but it didn’t matter. Jason struck, deflecting it in a random direction. There was a deep, reverberating metallic bonging noise, followed by a slam and the sound of a blade burying into wood.
Jason straightened and removed the blindfold, blinking under the fluorescent lights.
He’d batted the wingding straight into the steel frame of the treadmill in the corner, causing it to rebound across the room and impale shut one of the weapons’ drawers in the wall unit.
“Welp.” Dragon made a half-hearted attempt at jostling the drawer of shuriken open. “Guess that’s that.”
“I,” Jason rotated in place, unsteadily tracing his finger through the air in the treadmill’s direction. “I didn’t know that was there.”
“You didn’t remember it consciously, maybe. But you know the layout of this room.”
“It wasn’t on purpose.” Jason moved his finger to the sealed wingdings drawer. “I did not do that on purpose.”
“No?”
“No!” Jason ran a hand through his hair. “Who the hell would even -“
He rubbed a hand over his face. It was ridiculous.
“You look like you could use some more tea.”
“I didn’t hit you, though,” Jason said, staring into his cup. “So it can’t be that bad, right? It activated and I took a nonviolent option.”
They were back in the sitting room. The mess in the gym had been picked up while the tea was brewing, but the split in the drawer was beyond fixing.
“The nonviolent option was the effective one. Attacking me wouldn’t have amounted to anything.”
“Well aren’t you modest.” Jason rolled his eyes as he sipped the fragrant tea.
The corner of Dragon’s mouth quirked upwards before his expression sobered.
“I know it’s not what you want to hear Jason, but your ability is dangerous. It’s not mindless, but left uncontrolled there is risk for accidental casualties.”
“You sound like you would know.”
“I might.” Dragon leaned back in the leather sofa. “I’m told you met Ben.”
“Yeah. He’s running a dojo out in Detroit.”
“That’s good. We ran one ourselves in New York, for a while. A long time ago,” Dragon said. “You know that back in the day we used to freelance for the C.B.I.?”
Central Bureau of Intelligence. It’d been Amanda Waller’s show ever since Luthor became president.
“You were an agent?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. More like… circumstances would force us to join forces with the C.B.I. on occasion in order to help or protect people in need. Eventually we came to blows with the League of Assassins.”
Jason put his cup back down on the table.
“People were hurt. Ben’s fiance was killed and he went after them alone for revenge. That was the last I saw of him for a while, and when I finally found him he was… different.”
“He’d become the Bronze Tiger.” Jason’s time with Talia had given him a decent understanding of ninja history.
“Ben had his demons and the League knew how to exploit that. I tracked him down and found him with a man called Barney Ling, the head of a global agency that was really a puppet organization under the League. The Bronze Tiger had been outsourced to him, following his orders mindlessly. My friend came at me with intent to kill and… well.” Dragon folded his hands and rested them on one knee. “I didn’t think about or decide to push Ling out the window. It didn’t even occur to me that killing him would remove Ben’s reason for fighting me. I just did it.”
The room suddenly felt colder. Jason swallowed.
“Okay. So what you’re telling me is that basically we have some kind of hyper intuition… but instead of cool body-reading powers, I lose myself to some kind of violent blood rage?”
“It’s bit more precise than the term ‘blood rage’ allows, but -“
Jason gave a bewildered laugh, hands clapped over his face.
“You can’t tell Bruce about this. Absolutely not.”
“Jason -”
“Just, just tell him I want to talk to him about it myself okay? That’ll keep him off your back.” Jason sighed heavily. “I need to get a handle on this asap. He’ll never let me see the light of day again if I don’t. How did you do it?”
“I’ve found that with time, hard work and peaceful living-“
“Peaceful?” Jason’s mouth opened and shut around half-formed words before he gave up and clenched his eyes shut. “That was when it happened, right. After you killed that guy and Turner ran off, that’s when you disappeared off the face of the earth. Your powers scared you that bad?”
“It was more than that,” Dragon said calmly. “All around me people were getting hurt. My students, my friends, even those that had only the most tangential of relations to me.”
“But you were untouchable,” Jason said, echoing Talia’s words. “Right?”
“I couldn’t protect everyone. I couldn’t save Ben from himself,” Dragon said. “It’s like I told Vic, like I told Helena. Some fights can’t be won. They tear you apart and turn you into the thing you hate.”
“I don’t accept that,” Jason said as he stood up. “All fights can be won. Maybe you’ll need help, maybe you’ll need tools, or time. And good on you for doing what was best for you, if going into the mountains was it. But walking away isn’t an option for me. It’s not who I am.”
Dragon looked at Jason appraisingly.
“You really do remind me of her, in some ways.”
Jason faltered. “I. I’ve got to get ready for patrol. But I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here.”
He pulled on his jacket and made for the exit, his whole body feeling somehow heavier than it had when he entered.